Your License to Chill is Your License to Fly

Today is National Relaxation Day and this week is National Aviation Week. What do those two have to do with each other and why should you care? This will tie them together, ease your stress, and give you wings, so read on. 

Wilbur and Orville Wright didn’t have pilot’s licenses, and no one needs a license to chill. 

The same year that the first states – Massachusetts and Missouri – began requiring drivers licenses of anyone who wanted to operate a car on public roads, Orville and his older brother Wilbur made the first powered flight. They didn’t even have drivers’ licenses, and certainly didn’t have pilots’ licenses because those hadn’t been invented yet. Neither brother had a high school diploma, neither attended college, and yet with their fascination for aviation, their insatiable desire for experimentation, and their commitment to manned flight in a heavier-than-air motorized vehicle, they made discoveries and created systems that are still in use on airplanes today. They went into business together in 1889 with a printing press they invented, morphed from printing to bicycle development, sales and repairs a few years later, and it was in the back of that bicycle shop that their experiments with flying machines began in earnest. When they made discoveries, they patented them and put them into use. On December 17, 1903, they took turns piloting the Wright Flyer, the first motorized plane with a human onboard.   

Today we think of the Wright brothers as successful inventors and businessmen. During the time after their triumphant flights on the beaches of Kitty Hawk, NC, they were harassed by lawsuits, had their intellectual property stolen, were ridiculed in the press in the United States as well as in Europe, and even the Smithsonian Institution tried to usurp the brothers’ claim to fame when they said a plane invented by Smithsonian employee Samuel Langley was the first “heavier than air craft capable of manned flight” even though it never actually carried a person and the test flights all crashed into the Potomac River.  

What the Wright brothers illustrated by how they lived their lives was insatiable curiosity, incredible analytical prowess, and indefatigable resilience. They had stress – a lot of it – and they didn’t let it stop them.  

Many, if not most, people go through life feeling like they’re not good enough – they aren’t smart enough, or don’t have the right degree, or didn’t get that degree from the right university, or don’t have what it takes to get the job they really want, or aren’t interesting or good-looking enough to get the life partner of their dreams, or … or … or. You can probably imagine the stress all those self-defeating thoughts cause! I’ve had thoughts like that, and maybe you have, too. Sometimes we kill our dreams instead of getting to live them simply by believing those self-defeating thoughts. What would aviation look like today if the Wright brothers had fallen prey to the nay-sayers inside and outside their heads?   

If you’d like some tools to help you be more like the Wright brothers – able to let stress go so you can soar – here are some Tiny Bites podcasts for you. Every day a new episode comes out – 90 seconds or less – with wellbeing strategies for success, and we talk about coping with stress a lot:  

• Want a reason to feel good about stress? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that! 
• Need help putting stressors into perspective? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that! 
• Need to banish that burned-out feeling? Here’s a Tiny Bite for that!  

Your goals and dreams don’t have to be as lofty as the Wright brothers’ – in order to achieve and live those goals and dreams, you do need to learn to feel the stress, let it inspire you, and then let it go while you focus on your achievement of them and enjoyment in them. What dream do you want to chase today? Relax and let it play inside your head, safe from the stressful self-defeating thoughts that’ll kill it. 

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